War Over Women, Not Caterpillars

“We’ll pay for our own birth control, thank you very much,” says the female narrator at the end of a minute-long political action committee ad.

It is the president who is waging a war on women, the ad contends, reeling off the number of women who have lost jobs since the recession, college graduates having trouble finding jobs and the alleged impact of the president’s health-care law on women and the elderly.

It’s the work of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC, a relatively small group that has raised a lot of its funds, $2.5 million this year, from small donors. The committee had about $300,000 in the bank as of Oct. 17.

There’s a war on women, all right, the left-leaning American Bridge 21st Century PAC maintains — it’s coming from Republicans such as Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who added the concept of “legitimate rape” to the Senate race there, and Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, who maintained in a Senate debate that children born of rape fulfill God’s will.

And it includes Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who has said he supports abortion in cases of rape or a threat to the life of the mother, but is shown in an interview with Mike Huckabee saying he’d “absolutely” support a constitutional amendment saying life begins at conception.

American Bridge has drawn $1 million from billionaire George Soros.

“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus famously said in an interview with Bloomberg’s Al Hunt for the television program, “Political Capital with Al Hunt.”

There’s small money and big money talking in these ads.

The war here is central to the gender gap that benefits Obama, one which Romney hopes to erode on Nov. 6.